


ere: previous to, before, early, or soon

by nonbinarywithaknife (littleboxes)



Series: dimension 20 [75]
Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Backstory, Campaign 05: A Crown of Candy, Character Study, Gen, Growing Up, Implied Politics, Lazuli Rocks (Briefly) - Freeform, Magic, Neither Fluff nor Angst, Pre-Canon, accidental animal death, an extremely specific kind of apathy, daredevil adjacent childhood shenanigans, i can't write a cumulous fic that has coherent tags im sorry, implied miscarriage for literally (1) line thats it, very heavy 2am abstract thoughts energy here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:13:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27653930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleboxes/pseuds/nonbinarywithaknife
Summary: a study of cumulous rocks.
Relationships: Cumulous Rocks & Lazuli Rocks
Series: dimension 20 [75]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1706107
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	ere: previous to, before, early, or soon

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to aj @thevalleyisjolly for saying (1) nice thing about my works which made me go into a cumulous spiral. this is for u <3  
> this is like. a spiritual prequel to [gentleness](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25742263)

Cumulous Rocks doesn't cry when he is born. His mother tells him the midwife thought he was dead until he blinked his tiny purple eyes and seemed to squint right at her.

Cumulous Rocks is a quiet child. No, that's not quite right. He grows through childhood as if he is waiting for something. His silence is expectant and he speaks only when he has something to say.

He and his family (his mother, and his father, the ghost of an older sister that is never spoken about) live on a respectable estate in the countryside.

He is a Rocks, and a distant one. His father whispers _cousins who are invited to the gatherings as a courtesy_ with bitterness. They politely decline because the distance is simply too great to justify the expense. He receives the tutoring expected of a young noble son with something bordering on boredom. His father spends most of his time in the study. His mother does not understand him. Life goes on.

When he is three, Cumulous somehow escapes his minder (he is three and tiny; a cotton candy waif that drifts about, drinking everything in with childishly wide eyes and curious silence; he doesn't stumble like most little children are expected to, rather, when he trips, he it almost seems like the wind has pushed him off course.)

While his mother frantically orders the servants to search the house and the minder makes his shaky apologies in the face of her wrath and his father sits unaffected in his study, undisturbed, Cumulous drifts through the sugar-grass fields of their estate and a butterfly catches his eye.

It is a shimmery yellow, and the spun lemon-sugar of its wings glints in the sunlight, and little, too-quiet Cumulous tilts his head and follows it. It flutters along, ever so close and still too high for his grabbing hands to reach, and little Cumulous isn't quick enough to follow it, not quite, not with the wind shoving him about. That doesn't stop him. He is three years old and the sugar crystals are shining, so he keeps on the chase.

He is in a forest filled with peppermint-birch wood trees that seem to touch the sky and the keep that is his home has already been forgotten in the face of these new wonders and the butterfly alights on the swaying leaf of a fern. Cumulous, legs shaky and breath heaving with exhaustion, catches up. He has no eyes for the great stones that are surrounding him; no eyes for the eerie lack of wear upon their surface, no eyes for the strange way they both repel and attract the air around them at once. They are great and looming in the shadows and he is a cotton candy child with eyes only for gentle wings in a slim ray of sunshine.

He reaches up and clasps his hands around it and even as he opens them again the crushed sugar is beginning to melt against the warmth of his hands. The wings flap weakly once more before they still entirely. Cumulous stares, with wide, too-bright purple eyes.

His minder finds him sometime later, a puddle of sugar still cradled in tiny hands, silent tears running down his face.

Cumulous is fourteen and balancing on the tower wall. He's taller and thicker than the three year old with melted sugar tracing his palms, and it is a windy day.

The breeze keeps knocking his hair into his face. He doesn't like to tie it back the way his father insists on, and hadn't taken the wind into account. It itches where it lies across his nose, and he holds his breath.

He holds his arms out for balance and feels the muscles contract and the wind brush against them. Goosebumps rise up and down his skin and he shivers. He tilts his head to try and make his bangs move, and skin stretches across his collarbone. Even that tiny movement requires him to adjust his footing. 

The sun hasn't come up yet. The servants are awake, but he has made a game out of avoiding them. (They like him enough to play along, though perhaps had they known where he was going they might've sent him back to his room instead of averting their eyes with a small, amused smile.)

He looks down, and squints against the wind. His tunic- the one he sleeps in, because all the others he owns take too much time to put on, and they're too fitted for him to balance right- billows as another breeze comes. His toes scrunch against stone as he wobbles again. His arms sway. The ground is blurry in the distance. The pink sweet grass and the red poppies and purple violets all blur together into a watercolor mess. The treeline is too far to be anything more than a black and white wall that makes him smell lemon sugar.

Cumulous takes a step forward. The stone doesn't crumble beneath him, because the stonemasons that built it took care in the quality of their work. He takes another, and shifts his weight when the wind tries to move him. The sun rises, and Cumulous walks the wall, swaying like a stalk of sweet grass, and watching the sun.

He makes it halfway around the tower before there's a scream and movement on the ground below. He can see the frantic motions of the servant who spotted him as she grabs another and points. The sun has cast his shadow, and he has nowhere to hide.

His mother will be awake by now. There's no point in running back to his room, so he keeps walking the wall instead. He's three-quarters of the way around the tower when his mother bursts through the roof door, red in the face.

He doesn't protest when she yanks him down, and wonders if he'll ever be able to beat the sun to the other side of the tower.

He meets Lazuli when he is nineteen and his family is at Castle Candy proper. All of the family, even the cousins too distant to rate a card for the holidays, are here, and Cumulous has already forgotten the occasion. The walls are high and the stone is barely crumbled. He'd need to rip off his sleeves for better freedom of movement, but he could scale them, he thinks.

When the trumpeter introduces him, they say, _Cumulous Rocks, of the House of Rocks_ , and Cumulous doesn't like it. Not because he dislikes his house. But there is an implication in titles, and when Cumulous thinks of what he is _of_ , the House of Rocks is not the first thing to come to mind.

As he stands in the ballroom, taller than most of his extended family and eyeing the walls for a good one to lean against, the Archmage Lazuli Rocks approaches him.

"Cousin," she says, bowing her head politely.

"Cousin," he replies, bowing from the waist.

Their discussion is short, and illuminating. Cumulous decides to walk the crowd instead, as Lazuli moves away. He has always thought better on his feet. She has given him much to think about.

The monastery is sprawling. The halls are smoothly carved and heavy with age and the libraries are cavernous. Across the halls from the cavernous libraries are sparring rooms filled with motion. Every inch of it is alive with magic. Magic like dust motes hanging in sunlight and magic like looming stones and magic like rolling fields of swaying grass and it coats his hands like melted sugar. It is everything and nothing like his home, and Cumulous falls in love with it, and never stops falling.

Lazuli teaches it to him, magic, and the first time he reaches for that feeling, of dust motes and standing stones and rolling fields, he can taste lemons on his tongue and he runs it along sharpened teeth.

The magic he learns from old, old books in great, cavernous libraries is not dust motes and standing stones and sweet grass- or, not only. It is sharp-toothed and hungry, it yawns and does it deeply, and the absence of it feels like falling off of a well-made wall, and Cumulous never stops falling.

"Cousin," Lazuli says, holding out the package.

"Cousin," Cumulous replies, taking it.

It's easy to disappear. He spares one last look for the keep that was his home, and then steps off the wall (the stone is steady), Fluffwind in his hand.

The drop is as exhilarating as he always thought it would be, and he smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> im feeling several different extremely specific emotions about cumulous and they can all be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyHbqMFLj1MIC41FE9sLPaOd5Nvt--4Eo)


End file.
